Questions on HTF Temperatures & ORC Template Table in CSP Tower Molten Salt

Hello SAM community,I’m setting up a CSP molten-salt power tower with a user-defined ORC cycle (R600) in SAM 2025.4.16 and have a few questions:1. System Design → HTF hot/cold temperature

• In the System Design tab, should the “HTF hot temperature” and “HTF cold temperature” fields be set to the maximum and minimum operating temperatures of the molten‐salt loop (e.g. 565 °C / 290 °C for a solar salt)?
• Or should they instead reflect the temperatures of my ORC working fluid?

2. Power Cycle → Low/Design/High HTF temperature

• Under Power Cycle → Create a template table…, the independent‐variable axes ask for Low HTF temperature, Design HTF temperature, and High HTF temperature.
• Are these values referencing the molten salt inlet temperature to the ORC heat exchanger, or the internal working‐fluid (R600) evaporation/condensation temperatures?

3. Generating the ORC template table

• Is it acceptable (or recommended) to generate the 180×5 independent‐variable “template table” for the ORC via a MATLAB script using the CoolProp library (e.g. looping over HTF T, normalized ṁ, ambient T and exporting Q/P values)?
• Has anyone successfully automated their Power-Cycle table this way?

Any guidance, examples, or best practices would be greatly appreciated!Thanks in advance,
 

Hi Samin,

For questions 1 and 2, those temperatures refer to system operating temperatures rather than fluid properties.

For question 3, I'll defer to others. I am not familiar with the CoolProp library.

Best regards,
Paul.

Can you help me with any paper or related research work? I am working on a CSP power tower molten salt technology using Organic Rankine Cycle as working fluid.

Hi Samen,

See the CSP Publications page on the SAM website for a list of publications about SAM's concentrating solar power and industria process heat models:  sam.nrel.gov/concentrating-solar-power/csp-publications.html

Best regards,
Paul.